Mission

The Digital Currency Initiative is a group at
MIT focusing on cryptocurrency and its underlying
technologies. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin enable
open, trustless digital payments and
contracts. In the spirit of the Internet's wide reach,
this technology, and the people behind it, have the
potential to impact billions of people and
become a crucial part of daily life. We seek to push
the envelope on the development of this technology with
fundamental research, while shedding light on the
associated benefits, risks, and ethical quandaries.
Beyond research centered at MIT, we also help support
open-source cryptocurrency communities and diversity, and hope to
foster a broader academic community in this space.

Contact Us

dci@media.mit.edu

The Open Music Initiative

Navigating the Labyrinth of Digital Rights.

When a piece of work is created or performed, the digital rights to that piece are oftentimes complex and spread across many different organizations and entities. This makes it difficult for artists to get paid for their work and many large platforms, like Spotify, suffer from lawsuits because they don’t do a good enough job of navigating the labyrinth. How might you build a system to help artists get paid for their work? In partnership with the Berklee College of Music, Harvard Berkman Center, and several industry partners in the Open Music Initiative, we are investigating the design of a blockchain-inspired open and interoperable digital rights management platform.

Decentralized Publishing

The Centralized Web?

Between 1989 and 2015, the World Wide Web transformed from an esoteric system for publishing technical notes to a basic infrastructure of commerce, learning and social interaction. In the process, the Web has centralized around a few key points of control, owned by large, for-profit, publicly traded companies which have enormous influence on our online interactions. And because so many of our interactions - commercial, interpersonal and civic - are mediated online, we have inadvertently given these companies a great deal of control over our political lives and civic discourse. In collaboration with the Center for Civic Media, we will identify and evaluate the status of structurally decentralized projects in the fields of online publishing, online social networks, and discovery of online content (directory and search). From this work we will launch an experiment in building a structurally decentralized publication system designed to solve a real and relevant problem within academic computing, but more broadly, to offer a proof of concept for one approach to building decentralized social networks and publishing systems.

Onboarding for Digital Remittances in Mexico

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin show promise in the developing world for digitizing remittances, freeing up transactions, lowering costs and boosting financial inclusion. But without more accessible entry and exit points into the system, adoption will likely suffer. Working with the Mexican finance ministry, a DCI-led team is developing a blueprint for anti-money laundering and “know your customer” (AML/KYC) procedures that could make it easier for under-documented immigrants in the U.S. to meet remittance service providers’ strict identity requirements while also streamlining the delivery of funds into recipient Mexican families' debit cards. The project envisages using a combination of digital identity proxies and anonymized data generated by bitcoin transactions to give compliance officers a more detailed, big-data-based analysis of network fund flows. The hope is that this will allow more advanced monitoring of illicit finance risks without exposing the identify of users. The goal is to propose an alternative to the existing risk-management model in which draconian policies result in blanket denials for applicants who lack U.S. state-issued ID.

Securitized Financing for Solar Microgrids

Creating Crypto Energy Securities to Finance Sustainable Energy.

A DCI team, working with students and faculty from the MIT Sloan Management school and MIT Engineering Department, is exploring using digital currency and distributed-ledger technology to securitize transactions among users and owners of blockchain-managed solar microgrids. The goal is to create a secure form of reliable, executable collateral to lower risks for lenders and reduce the cost of financing decentralized renewable energy infrastructure, especially in developing countries. The team is developing an Ethereum-based smart contract that triggers timed access to a solar electricity resource while payments by the user are up to date. The idea is to create a form of “smart property” whose usage rights can be managed remotely. The team is exploring different investment structures to manage these resources, including a cooperatively owned microgrid in which power generation, sharing and usage, as well as payments and administrative protocols are governed via decentralized, blockchain-based mechanisms. Pilot sites are being explored in India and other parts of the developing world. The long-term objective is to create a platform upon which financial engineers can create structured securities backed by solar generation revenues, allowing higher level capital to flow down to local projects and finance the ongoing rollout of a decentralized renewable infrastructure in the developing world.

User-controlled Credit Identities

In recent years we have seen a drastic expansion in the types of data being used to evaluate credit-worthiness. This opens up new opportunities to deliver services to underserved populations, ideally services that are catered to their specific needs and lifestyles. However, much of this data are locked-in to the applications in which they were generated, making it nearly impossible for consumers to leverage it to access a broader set of opportunities. In this project, we develop a toolkit that enables consumers in East Africa to knit together a credit identity from across a variety of data silos. We will then develop a blockchain-enabled back end infrastructure that empowers our target users to leverage the data generated from these devices in an open marketplace of credit lenders, in a "credit bureau of the 21st century."

Digital Currency at Central Banks

Does Cryptocurrency Have a Place in Central Bank Payment Systems?

Money is at the heart of the financial system - its most basic element. Fundamental reform of the system starts with addressing how money works today and how it could work in the future. The emergence of digital currency has led several central banks to consider how this new technology affects their ability to discharge their mandates. One of the most significant questions is whether digital versions of fiat currencies can be issued and what the role of the central bank should be in a financial system being changed by new technology.

We are working to address some of the fundamental questions in computer science, economics and law which need to be addressed to bring about this reformation of the financial system.

MedRec

Years of regulation have stifled tech
development in medical data management,
while an array of incompatible back-end
systems and fragmented data trails limit
patients’ ability to engage with their
medical history. We have developed MedRec, an
open-source program that applies
blockchain smart contracts to create a
decentralized content-management system
for healthcare data, and have piloted the project with Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. MedRec sets up an
authentication log to govern medical
record access, while providing means for
auditability and data sharing. Its modular
design integrates with providers’
existing, local data storage solutions,
enabling interoperability. The system
engages directly with medical researchers,
who provide the “mining” needed to secure
and sustain the authentication log on a
private, Ethereum network. Read the whitepaper here.

How Bitcoin enables a Machine-Payable Web

Balaji Srinivasan

First, we had the World Wide Web, a web of links between documents. Then we had the Social Web, a social network of relationships between people. We believe the third web will be the Machine-Payable Web, where each node in the network is a machine and each edge is a micropayment between machines.

Towards this end, we've developed open source software called 21 that makes it easy to perform Bitcoin micropayments over HTTP. The software allows you to get digital currency onto any machine headlessly, set up web services that accept and transmit bitcoin over HTTP, and discover other machines with similar services to autonomously trade with.

The overall effect is to turn digital currency into a scarce system resource on par with CPU, RAM, and hard drive space. That is, just as one can create a database index that spends disk space to save time, we show that one can instead spends digital currency to outsource a computation to save time.

To illustrate the applications, we conclude with several working examples: bitcoin-aware intelligent agents, APIs that implement autonomous surge pricing, and the development of a market data structure as an alternative in many situations to the well known queue. We ask that audience members bring their laptops to code along with the speaker!

Balaji S. Srinivasan is the CEO & cofounder of 21.co and a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to taking the role of CEO at 21, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He was named to the MIT TR35, was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, and taught a MOOC with 200k+ students at startup.stanford.edu. He holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

Initial Coin Offerings

Patrick Murk and Marco Santori

The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a new and controversial trend among tech disruptors: Raising seed capital without investors, pitch decks or term sheets. In an ICO, developers pre-sell a cryptographic token that will later fuel a decentralized network - potentially raising over $100m at a time. But is it legal? Is it Ethical? Is it good for the market? Marco and Patrick will discuss how to “ICO” the right way, that is, the legal way including best practices for developers looking to tap into these new capital markets.

The Stellar Consensus Protocol

David Mazieres

This talk will present federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), a generalization of the standard Byzantine agreement problem. Unlike traditional Byzantine agreement--which presupposes unanimous agreement on system membership--the FBA model grants organizations individual control over whom to trust, allowing membership to grow organically out of pairwise relationships between participants. Compared to proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, two other decentralized alternatives to Byzantine agreement, FBA enables far more efficient constructions with greater margins of computational security. The talk will further present the Stellar consensus protocol (SCP), the first FBA protocol. SCP forms the backbone of the Stellar payment network, where it secures financial transactions. Other potential applications include secure timestamping and strengthening certificate transparency.

David Mazières is best known for co-authoring "Get Me Off Your F-----g Mailing List," a novelty paper that in 2014 was accidentally accepted for publication by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (IJACT). He currently serves as the Chief Scientist of Stellar Development Foundation, where he conducted the work presented in this talk. Everyone trying to communicate with Prof. Mazières hates Mail Avenger, his open-source anti-spam SMTP server, though his mail synchronization tool "muchsync" has garnered a less hostile reception. Despite not having a normal email address, Prof. Mazières manages to hold down additional jobs as a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and a co-founder of Intrinsic (formerly GitStar).